As someone who worked on the development of the first
British atomic bomb, on early ideas for a thermonuclear
weapon, and on nuclear reactors for research and power
production from 1949 through 1964, I have always been gripped
by stories of the early nuclear pioneers in the United
States: Hans Bethe, Enrico Fermi, Robert Oppenheimer, Leo
Szilard, Edward Teller and John von Neumann, among them. But
I must confess I turned to Peter Goodchild’s biography of
Edward Teller with reservations, even before I opened
the cover. It was the subtitle that put me off: The Real
Dr Strangelove. No question mark. No doubt about it.
Teller is the real Dr Strangelove. Or is he?

It seems strange that a work that purports to show us ‘one
of the most powerful scientists of the twentieth century in
all his enigmatic humility,’ and succeeds in doing so in
many places, should begin by comparing him with a fictional
character who appears in an admittedly brilliant, highly
satirical, and hugely funny film, for a brief six minutes
forty seconds. Kubrick’s film, Dr Strangelove (1965),
tells the story of a US Air Force Commander, Jack D Ripper,
who, convinced that the Commies are contaminating his bodily
fluids, orders a nuclear strike on Russia. He seals off his
base and cuts all communications. There is, it seems, no way
of calling the aircraft back. The President gathers his
advisors around him in the war room to deal with the crisis.
His advisors include Air Force General Buck Turgidson, and a
scientist, Dr Strangelove, a ‘Kraut’, confined to a
wheelchair, whose right arm, as the tension mounts,
involuntarily rises to a Nazi salute, and he addresses the
President as ‘Mein Fuhrer’. He is a ‘mad scientist’ in the
Frankenstein mould. In the introduction to his book,
Goodchild considers a number of candidates for the most
likely inspiration behind the character. Edward Teller, he
says, was Hungarian, but spent nearly a decade studying at
German universities. Unlike the others, he had an obvious
disability, he was ‘father’ of the H-bomb as well as a
nuclear strategist who had both advised and opposed
presidents. And, he adds, Teller’s life ‘can be seen as a
rich variation on the theme of manic obsession, which lies
at the heart of Kubrick’s film and was personalized in the
character of Dr Strangelove.’

This is not good enough. Teller hated Nazis and Communists.
His disability, though noticeable when he walked – he lost
his foot in an accident and wore a prosthesis – was quite
minor compared to that of Strangelove, and although manic
obsession is a theme of Kubrick’s film it is evidenced much
more in the characters of Jack D Ripper and General
Turgidson, and certainly for longer periods of time, than in
the mad scientist. Nor would Teller have reacted with such
uncontrolled passion when advising a president: even his
detractors praised the charm and diffident manner which won
him many favors in the political arena. After putting
forward points in favor of Teller as Dr Strangelove,
Goodchild backs off. ‘I have highlighted those elements that
create a match with Kubrick’s fictional obsessive,’ he
writes, ‘but there are many other elements in Edward
Teller’s life that complicate, confuse and even confound
this picture.’ And he ends the introduction rather lamely by
saying that he hopes the book will provide a better
understanding of one of the most powerful scientists of the
twentieth century – a real Dr Strangelove.’

I have dealt with this topic at some length because it is
symptomatic of the way in which the author himself sometimes
complicates and confuses the issues. It would have been best
if he kept things simple. His grasp of nuclear physics is
shaky, and his occasional attempts to explain the science
behind nuclear reactors and nuclear weapons are not only
unnecessary in a biography but unwise. In describing the
role of the moderator in slowing down neutrons in a nuclear
reactor he confuses absorption, which is to be avoided, with
elastic scattering, which is the prime requirement. A
reactor built on his lines would simply not work.

Teller died less than two years ago. He will be remembered
not for his contribution to the wartime fission bombs – he
made important calculations on the compression of plutonium
but refused to oversee the follow-up work – but for his
unforgivable testimony against Oppenheimer in the security
hearings in 1954; his uncompromising promotion of full-scale
development of thermonuclear weapons; his opposition to
attempts to contain the nuclear arms race; and his advocacy
of the Strategic Defense Initiative (“Star Wars”).

These issues have been aired and debated at length in
previous books, but Goodchild makes use of material which
has only recently become available: Teller’s Memoirs,
published in 2001 when Teller was 93 years old, and his
letters to his fellow scientist and confidante, Maria
Gopperts Mayer. While the memoirs are largely
self-justifying, they do provide a remarkable account of his
early years in Hungary and Germany and do much to explain
his later fears and obsessions. His letters to Mayer reveal
the state of Teller’s mind at critical moments in his life
in America. ‘I am really convinced that whoever is really
nice to me must be crazy...,’ he wrote to her in 1946, when
on the point of leaving Los Alamos for the University of
Chicago.

Edward Teller was born in Budapest in 1908, the son of a
prosperous Jewish lawyer, and brought up at a time of great
political unrest and violence. With the break-up of the
Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1918, Hungary became an
independent state and was for a brief period in 1919 a
communist republic under Bela Kun which was quickly
overthrown and replaced by an oppressive fascist regime,
headed by Admiral Horthy. As members of the bourgeoisie, the
Teller family suffered severe deprivation under the Kun
regime, Edward’s father no longer being allowed to practice
law. As Jews, they found themselves ostracized under the
rule of Horthy. In 1920, Horthy restricted the admission of
Jews to the universities and in order to study science,
Edward Teller left ‘this doomed society’ in 1926 to enter
the Technical Institute at Karlsruhe. He studied chemistry
for two years but then went to Leipzig where, under the
supervision of Heisenberg, he took his PhD in physics in
1930. He ended his student days a year later when he was
appointed Assistant Professor at Göttingen at the age of
just twenty-three

This world came to end in 1933 when Hitler rose to power in
Germany and Nazi propaganda was directed against Jewish
scientists. With aid from the British scientific community,
Teller was given a base in London which allowed him take up
a Rockefeller Grant to study for a year under Niels Bohr in
Copenhagen. In 1934, he left London to take up a full
professorship at George Washington University in Washington
DC offered to him by an old friend George Gamov. He was now
financially secure and entering a ‘wonderful quiet period’
in his life. In 1940, when German troops were moving across
Europe, and both America and Britain were exploring the
feasibility of atomic bombs based on nuclear fission, Teller
felt an obligation ‘to do whatever I could’ to protect the
freedom of his adopted country. In 1941 he moved to the
University of Columbia in New York to join Fermi and Szilard
in their work on an embryonic uranium reactor.

On December 6, one day before the attack on Pearl Harbor,
the United States embarked on a crash program to develop
an atomic bomb. The task of coordinating uranium research at
the universities of Columbia, Princeton, Chicago and
California, was given to Arthur Compton, chairman of the
physics department at Chicago. He decided that scientists
under his supervision at Columbia and Princeton should be
transferred to the euphemistically named Metallurgical
Laboratory at Chicago. Fermi moved in at the end of April
1942 and the construction of a nuclear reactor (Chicago Pile
1) began. Teller was left behind, because, he was told, the
theoretical problems of nuclear reactions had already been
solved, but the real reason was a delay in securing
clearance for secret work. Two months later he was called to
Chicago, though no role had been assigned to him. While at
Columbia, Fermi had raised with him the question of whether
a fission bomb might be used to produce a thermonuclear
reaction using deuterium as a fuel, and with no other task
assigned to him at Chicago, Teller began to explore the
possibilities of designing such a thermonuclear weapon,
often referred to as a Super, or an H-bomb. It became an
obsession.

In early 1943 a new research laboratory under the
supervision of Robert Oppenheimer was built at Los Alamos,
New Mexico to work on the actual design of the atomic bomb.
Teller moved there in April confident that he was the best
person to direct the theoretical division, but his hopes
were soon dashed. Oppenheimer appointed instead Teller’s
friend Hans Bethe to head the division with Teller as one of
his team. Teller was deeply hurt and never fully cooperated
in the development of the fission bomb. He was taken off the
work and given a small team to look at theoretical aspects
of his pet project, the Super, which by then had been
relegated to a distant second place behind the work on
fission in the allocation of resources. Bette had no
alternative. ‘Teller,’ he said later, ‘wanted to see the
project run like a theoretical physics seminar and spent a
great deal of time talking and very little time doing solid
work on the main line of the Laboratory.’ The ‘solid work’
at the Laboratory led to the successful development of two
different types of atomic weapons: a U-235 bomb called
Little Boy and a plutonium bomb called Fat Man.

On August 6 1945 a uranium bomb was dropped on Hiroshima;
three days later a plutonium bomb was dropped on Nagasaki.
Japan surrendered. Within a month, half the staff of Los
Alamos had dispersed. Oppenheimer resumed his academic
career in California but in 1947 became director of the
Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton. When the Atomic
Energy Commission took over the task of running the nuclear
programs from the military in 1947, Oppenheimer became
part-time chairman of its General Advisory Council. Bethe
returned to Cornell. Norris Bradbury took over from
Oppenheimer as director of Los Alamos and tried to stem the
loss of senior staff. Teller was invited to stay as director
of a much reduced theoretical division but demanded as a
condition that the Laboratory should mount a large scale
program to develop the Super or plan twelve tests a year
on fission bombs. Given the staff and resources available
the demand was quite unrealistic and Teller returned to a
chair of physics at Chicago. Convinced that Russia was now a
threat to America, he continued to urge the need for a Super
and made periodical visits to Los Alamos, as consultant,
with suggestions for a possible design, called the
‘classical Super’. In the early summer of 1949 Teller was
persuaded to return to Los Alamos full-time. Bethe also
returned. The first Soviet atomic bomb was exploded on
August 29 and, after frantic discussions on how to respond,
President Truman authorized preparations for the quantity
production of thermonuclear weapons. This was a victory for
Teller and for the equally committed Ernest Lawrence and
Luis Alvarez of Berkeley, who had lobbied vigorously for it
in Washington.

Despite Truman’s words, there was no thermonuclear weapon to
produce. Calculations showed that Teller’s classical Super
was far from promising. Stanislaw Ulam suggested a possible
solution using a primary fission bomb to compress
thermonuclear materials in a secondary assembly. Teller took
it up and turned it into what became known as the Teller-Ulam
experiment. The configuration is still secret and the exact
contributions of Ulam and Teller may never be revealed.
Teller was reluctant to share the credit although he did
later acknowledge that it was the work of many people. An
experimental version of the Teller-Ulam configuration (Mike)
was successfully exploded on November 1 1952 and a
deliverable version (Bravo) on March 1 1954. The yield of
Bravo was nearly 15 megatons, more than 1,000 times that of
the Hiroshima bomb. The Soviet exploded a low yield
thermonuclear weapon on August 12 1953, and a second with a
yield well in the megaton range on November 23 1955. A
thermonuclear arms race had begun.

But even before the Mike shot, Teller had left Los Alamos,
again falling out with top managers over the direction of
the program. He lobbied for the establishment of a second
weapons laboratory and was allowed to brief the Secretary of
State and the Secretary of Defense. He succeeded in
overcoming opposition from the AEC and in September 1952 a
new Laboratory opened at Livermore in California, with
Teller on the Scientific Steering Committee, but with no
formal management authority. After a unpromising start – its
first tests were a failure - Livermore contributed greatly
to weapon development.

All this is well covered by Goodchild, but the book really
comes to life with the “Star Wars” program. Buoyed up by his
successes in Washington, Teller turned from active science
to politics. He had learned that direct access to
Presidential advisors was far more effective than using
formal channels. He also knew that extravagant promises and
wildly optimistic timescales gained support for his cause.
Believing that Russians could not be trusted he bitterly
opposed the nuclear test moratorium of 1958-1961 – to the
chagrin of Eisenhower, who came to regard Teller as a
high-pressure super salesman. Teller also did much to secure
the failure of the 1963 Test Ban Treaty. It was with Ronald
Reagan that he had his greatest success. Livermore had been
experimenting with X-Ray lasers with the power to knock out
incoming Soviet ballistic missiles. Teller sold the idea to
a receptive Reagan as a means of obtaining ‘assured
survival’ though his descriptions of its capability were
well ahead of anything being thought of at Livermore. On
March 23 1982 the President announced the Strategic Defense
Initiative – SDI or “Star Wars” But the X-Ray laser program
was plagued with difficulties and promising trials were
shown to be flawed. Undeterred, Teller came up with another
entirely different system ‘Brilliant Pebbles’ which was
backed by Reagan and, more reluctantly, by his successor,
George Bush despite technical difficulties. SDI came to end
with the Clinton administration, by which time Teller had
retired.

[In my pantheon of nuclear ‘greats’, there would be places
for the Nobel Prize-winners Fermi and Bethe for their
contribution to physics, and Oppenheimer for his
achievements in science management. All three were respected
by their colleagues. There would be no place for Teller.]
Opinions of Edward Teller were, and are, sharply divided.
The scientist Isidor Rabi described him as an enemy of
humanity; Reagan was captivated. Somewhere between the two
extremes is a real Edward Teller but, as Goodchild
discovered, he is hard to find.